Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Two flights down, past gawking staff and a service corridor that hadn’t seen new paint since the Truman administration, Alessandro hauled the baker (Marina, her name was Marina, and her irritation prickled at the edge of his consciousness like static) toward the only person in this building qualified to fix what they’d done.
The hotel’s supernatural legal consultant was a centuries-old lich named Mortimer.
He operated out of a basement office that, by reputation, smelled of formaldehyde and regret.
Marina protested the entire way down, loudly enough to wake the dead.
Given where they were headed, that seemed appropriate.
“This is kidnapping,” she said for the fourth time.
“This is problem-solving.” He didn’t slow down. “There’s a difference.”
“The difference being?”
“Kidnapping implies I want you here. I assure you, I don’t.”
Through the bond, he felt her anger spike: hot and sharp, undercut by hurt she was trying to hide. He ignored it.
Control. Solve the problem. Move on.
Mortimer’s door was marked with symbols that glowed faintly in the dim corridor. Alessandro knocked once and entered without waiting for a response.
The lich looked up from a desk covered in legal texts and what appeared to be someone’s preserved spleen. His eye sockets glowed pale blue. His suit was immaculate.
“Mr. Draven.” The voice was surprisingly pleasant for something that had been dead for three centuries. “I heard there was an incident upstairs. I assumed you’d be visiting.”
“How did you—” Marina started.
“News travels fast in supernatural circles, Ms. Pearl.” Mortimer gestured to two chairs that definitely hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Please. Sit. And try not to touch anything.”
Alessandro sat. Marina hesitated, her resistance pressing back, the desire to flee sharp and unmistakable, before dropping into the chair beside him. The bond hummed with relief as the distance between them decreased.
Twenty-eight days of this. Twenty-eight days of feeling everything she feels.
“Show me the contract,” Mortimer said.
Alessandro produced the ruined parchment from his jacket. The coffee stains had dried into the ancient paper, creating patterns that seemed almost deliberate. The symbols still glowed faintly when he touched them.
Mortimer’s eye sockets flared brighter. “Ah. Oh dear. Oh, this is quite remarkable.”
“Remarkable isn’t the word I’d use.”
“No, I imagine not.” The lich leaned closer, skeletal fingers hovering over the document. “This is the original Draven curse contract, yes? Two centuries old, written in blood and binding magic?”
“You know about the curse?”
“Everyone knows about the curse, Mr. Draven. Your family’s misfortune is legendary.” Mortimer’s tone was matter-of-fact. “What I didn’t know was that the contract had been stored here in Sweetwater Cove. Fascinating choice.”
Marina’s confusion pressed against the edges of his awareness, sharpening into horror.
“The curse isn’t relevant right now,” Alessandro said. “What’s relevant is the bond. How do we break it?”
Mortimer’s eye sockets dimmed, then brightened, then dimmed again: the lich equivalent of a wince.
“You can’t.”
Alessandro’s breath left him. Beside him, Marina made a small, strangled sound.
“Explain,” Alessandro said.
“The bond you’ve created is…” Mortimer paused, searching for words. “Unprecedented. You have selkie magic: transformation, sea-binding, emotional resonance. The selkies’ ability to forge deep connections is legendary, Ms. Pearl. Your grandmother, I believe, was particularly gifted in that regard.”
Marina’s grief caught him off guard—a sharp contraction in his chest that wasn’t his, quickly suppressed.
“And you, Mr. Draven,” Mortimer continued, “contribute dragon magic. Fire, hoarding, territorial claiming. Dragons mate for life, as I’m sure you know. Your kind doesn’t form casual bonds.”
Heat prickled at Alessandro’s collar. He knew. Every dragon knew.
“Add to this the enchanted coffee, a luck charm, I’m told, which has the delightful property of amplifying whatever magic it touches.
And an ancient blood contract already saturated with two centuries of curse energy.
” Mortimer spread his skeletal hands. “The combination has produced something that doesn’t appear in any literature I’ve consulted. ”
“There has to be a way to break it.”
“There is. Time.” Mortimer steepled his fingers. “The next full moon is in twenty-eight days. At that point, the bond will dissolve naturally, provided neither of you takes action to maintain it.”
“What kind of action?”
“Mutual declaration under the full moon. Both parties stating, clearly and willingly, that they choose to remain bonded.” Mortimer’s skull tilted in what might have been amusement. “Given your current… dynamic, I suspect that won’t be an issue.”
Alessandro absorbed this. Twenty-eight days. Less than a month. He could survive anything for less than a month.
“What are the rules?” His voice came out steadier than he felt. “The limitations?”
“You cannot be more than fifty feet apart. The pain increases exponentially with distance. At sixty feet, you’ll both collapse. At a hundred feet, the bond will attempt to drag you back together by force.” Mortimer glanced between them. “I recommend staying well within the limit.”
Marina leaned forward. “What else?”
“Strong emotions are shared. Anger, fear, joy, desire; anything intense will bleed through the connection. Physical contact amplifies the effect.” Mortimer paused.
“I would advise against… intimate contact. It won’t make the bond permanent, but it will deepen the connection significantly.
The shared emotions would become more intense.
The distance limitations more restrictive.
” Mortimer’s skull tilted. “You would feel each other’s physical sensations as well as emotional ones. ”
Alessandro felt heat rise to his face: actual heat, the dragon responding to his embarrassment with a flush that probably made him look like he was about to breathe fire.
Marina’s mortification bled through. His ears went hot, her cheeks went red, and the whole thing looped between them until he couldn’t tell whose embarrassment was whose.
“That won’t be a problem,” he said.
“No,” Marina agreed, her voice slightly strangled. “It definitely won’t.”
They didn’t look at each other.
The walk back upstairs was silent.
Alessandro’s mind raced through possibilities, contingencies, solutions.
Twenty-eight days. He had to be within fifty feet of this woman for twenty-eight days.
His work in Manhattan was impossible now.
His search for the curse-breaker, complicated at best. His entire carefully structured life had been demolished in the span of an afternoon.
This is a setback. Nothing more. You adapt. You overcome. You fix it.
Except he couldn’t fix it. For the first time in a decade, he’d encountered a problem that didn’t have an immediate solution. He had to wait. He had to endure.
He hated waiting.
In the elevator, Marina broke first.
“I have a business to run.”
“So do I.”
“No, I mean—” She turned to face him, and he was struck again by how small she was. Small and furious and vibrating with defiance. “I have a bakery. I open at six AM. I start baking at four. I can’t just… I can’t abandon my life because you backed into me.”
“I didn’t back into you. You walked into me.”
“You were on your phone!”
“I was conducting important business!”
“You were being rude to a server!”
Alessandro’s dragon stirred, heat building in his chest. Marina flinched, registering his anger as if it were her own.
“Your emotions are very loud,” she said.
“So are yours.” Her frustration and fear came through the bond, and underneath them a stubborn determination that seemed at odds with the shy woman he’d been watching at the conference. “You’re not as meek as you pretend to be.”
“I’m not pretending anything.” Her eyes flashed. “And you’re not as in control as you think you are. I can feel it, you know. All that anger you keep pushing down. It’s like standing next to a furnace.”
The accuracy of the observation stung more than he wanted to admit.
They glared at each other. The elevator dinged.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Alessandro said as the doors opened. “I’ll get a hotel room. You’ll stay nearby…”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said no.” Marina’s chin lifted. Her fear reached him like a draft from an open window; she was terrified, actually terrified of him, but underneath it blazed her determination.
“I’m not staying in a hotel. I have a home.
I have an apartment above my bakery, and that’s where I’m going.
You can either come with me or you can experience what happens when we get sixty feet apart. ”
“You expect me to stay in your apartment?”
“I expect you to adapt. Isn’t that what you do? Solve problems?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Consider this a problem. Solve it.”
Alessandro stared at her. Through the bond, her pulse raced, and beneath it he caught exactly how much it cost her to stand up to him.
“Your apartment is above a bakery,” he said slowly.
“Yes.”
“Which you open at six AM.”
“Yes.”
“And you start baking at four.”
“Yes.” She crossed her arms. “Is there a problem?”
Several. Starting with the fact that I haven’t voluntarily woken before eight since law school.
“Fine.” The word came out clipped. Bitter. The taste of surrender. “I’ll need to retrieve my things from the hotel.”
“Fine.”
“And make arrangements for my work. I have cases. Clients. A life that doesn’t involve…” He gestured vaguely at the hotel around them, at her, at the entire catastrophic situation.
“A life that doesn’t involve clumsy bakers from nowhere?” Her voice was sharp.
She felt that. She felt me thinking it.
“I didn’t…”
“You did. I felt it.” She crossed her arms tighter. “Just get your things. I’ll wait in the lobby. Apparently I have to.”
“And this doesn’t mean…”
“Trust me,” Marina interrupted, “I know exactly what this doesn’t mean. You don’t want to be here. I don’t want you here. We’re stuck with each other for twenty-eight days, and then you’ll go back to your life and I’ll go back to mine and we’ll never speak again.”
She said it like a vow. Her desperation flooded him, how badly she wanted this to be over.
He felt the same way.
Didn’t he?
“Agreed,” he said.
The Salty Siren was not what Alessandro expected.
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, exactly. Something small and quaint, probably. Forgettable. The kind of place tourists photographed and immediately forgot.
But the bakery at twilight was… charming. Blue shutters and window boxes full of flowers. Warm light spilling through windows that displayed an artful arrangement of pastries. A hand-painted sign that swung gently in the evening breeze, reading The Salty Siren in elegant script.
It looked like something from a painting. Something from another century. The kind of place his grandfather might have visited, back when the Dravens had money to spend on quaint coastal vacations instead of desperately trying to outrun a curse.
Marina unlocked the door, and the smell engulfed him. Cinnamon. Vanilla. Sea salt. Something yeasty and alive, the ghost of bread that had been baked that morning.
His dragon stirred, not with anger this time, but with interest. With longing he didn’t want to examine.
“The apartment is upstairs.” Marina didn’t look at him. “There’s a couch. You can sleep there.”
“A couch.”
“It’s a nice couch.”
He followed her through the darkened bakery, past display cases and a counter worn smooth by generations of use.
The floorboards creaked underfoot. Photographs lined the walls: a woman who looked like an older version of Marina, smiling beside the bakery’s entrance.
Her grandmother, he realized. The one Mortimer had mentioned.
Marina’s exhaustion seeped into him: deep and wearing, the kind that came from emotional devastation rather than physical exertion.
She’s as tired as you are. She didn’t ask for this either.
He pushed the thought away.
The stairs to the apartment were narrow and steep. His designer suitcase bumped against the walls. At the top, Marina unlocked another door and stepped aside to let him enter.
The apartment was small. Tiny, really: a combined living room and kitchen, a single bedroom visible through an open door, what appeared to be a bathroom barely large enough to turn around in.
Every surface was covered in something: books, plants, mismatched cushions in sea-glass colors.
It smelled like the bakery below, but warmer. More lived-in.
It smelled like home.
Not my home. Not anything close to my home.
“The couch,” Marina said, pointing to a piece of furniture that was definitely not designed for someone of his height. “Blankets are in the closet. Bathroom is there. Kitchen is… well, you can see the kitchen.” She paused. “I wake up at four. I recommend earplugs.”
Alessandro looked at the couch. Looked at the apartment. Looked at the woman he was now magically bound to for the next twenty-eight days.
This is a nightmare. This is an actual nightmare.
“Twenty-eight days,” he said.
“Twenty-eight days,” she agreed.
Her relief washed through him, warm and immediate, chased by curiosity, quickly suppressed, about the man who’d invaded her life.
He felt the same curiosity about her. He hated that he felt it.
“Goodnight, Mr. Draven.”
“Alessandro.” The word came out before he could stop it. “If we’re going to be forced into proximity for a month, we might as well use first names.”
Her expression softened, just slightly, a loosening around her eyes. Surprise rippled across the connection between them, and warmth beneath it.
“Goodnight, Alessandro.”
She disappeared into her bedroom. The door closed.
Alessandro stood alone in the middle of Marina Pearl’s apartment, surrounded by the smell of cinnamon and sea salt, feeling her presence on the other side of a thin wall like an itch he couldn’t scratch.
He sat down on the couch, which was, as predicted, too small, and pulled out his phone. Eighteen missed calls. Thirty-two emails. David, probably panicking. His father, probably demanding updates. Malachar, probably watching with that knowing smile.
None of it mattered right now.
On the other side of the wall, water ran in the bathroom. A cabinet opened, closed. She moved through her own apartment as if it were unfamiliar terrain, careful around the edges of him, and he felt every wary step.
He set the phone face-down on the coffee table.